Interface technology, such as touch screens and voice recognition, are advancing beyond pointers and clicks

A brief history

Genesis: The first computer mouse, built at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, by Douglas Englebart and Bill English in 1963, was just a block of wood fashioned with two wheels. It was just one of a number of interfaces the team experimented with. There were also foot pedals, head-pointing devices and knee-mounted joysticks.

Growth: The mouse proved to be the fastest and most accurate, and with the backing of Apple founder Steve Jobs — who bundled it with shipments of Lisa, the predecessor to the Macintosh, in the 1980s — the device suddenly became a mainstream phenomenon. In 1983, Microsoft shipped the first PC-compatible mouse.

Swipe, swipe, pinch-zoom. Fifth-grader Josephine Nguyen is researching the definition of an adverb on her iPad and her fingers are flying across the screen. Her 20 classmates are hunched over their own tablets doing the same.

Conspicuously absent from this modern scene of high-tech learning: a mouse.

Nguyen, who is 10, said she has used one before — once — but the clunky desktop computer/monitor/keyboard/mouse setup was too much for her. “It was slow,” she recalled, “and there were too many pieces.”

Gilbert Vasquez, 6, is also baffled by the idea of an external pointing device named after a rodent. “I don’t know what that is,” he said with a shrug.

Nguyen and Vasquez, who attend public schools in Washington, D.C., are part of the first generation growing up with a computer interface that is vastly different from the one the world has gotten used to since the dawn of the personal-computer era in the 1980s.

This fall, for the first time, sales of iPads are cannibalizing sales of PCs in schools, according to Charles Wolf, an analyst for the investment research firm Needham & Co. And a growing number of even more sophisticated technologies for communicating with your computer — such as the Leap Motion boxes and Sony Vaio laptops that read hand motions, as well as voice recognition services such as Apple’s Siri — are beginning to make headway in the commercial market.

John Underkoffler, a former MIT researcher who was the adviser for the high-tech wizardry that Tom Cruise used in “Minority Report,” says that the transition is inevitable and that it will happen in as soon as a few years.

Underkoffler, chief scientist for Oblong, a Los Angeles-based company that has created a gesture-controlled interface for computer systems, said that for decades the mouse was the primary bridge to the virtual world — and that it was not always optimal.

“Human hands and voice, if you use them in the digital world in the same way as the physical world, are incredibly expressive,” he said.

“If you let the plastic chunk that is a mouse drop away, you will be able to transmit information between you and machines in a very different, high-bandwidth way.”

This type of thinking is turning industrial product design on its head. Instead of focusing on a single device to access technology, innovators are expanding their horizons to gizmos that respond to body motions, the voice, fingers, eyes and even thoughts. Some devices can be accessed by multiple people at the same time.